


Carousel.

by Abaddon



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Dissociation, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-08
Updated: 2015-06-08
Packaged: 2018-04-03 11:19:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,032
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4099117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abaddon/pseuds/Abaddon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"1943 tilted at an angle in senseless and isolated imagery.  It was a vintage calliope of blurred city lights on the horizon framed above windblown strands of towheaded hair.  It was the smell of carnival popcorn, cloying salt and thick grease hanging heavily in humid air, underlaid by the acrid reek of automobile fumes and cold, invigorating petrichor.  It was the warmth of summer's night, hitched alongside the glowing warmth of the people milling about."</p><p>The Captain is out of time in body, but the Winter Soldier is out of time in every way that matters. Just plot-what-plot character-study drabble bullshit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Carousel.

1943 tilted at an angle in senseless and isolated imagery. It was a vintage calliope of blurred city lights on the horizon, framed above windblown strands of towheaded hair. It was the smell of carnival popcorn, cloying salt and thick grease that hung in humid air, underlaid by the acrid reek of automobile fumes and cold, vibrant petrichor.

The year curled into the warmth of summer's night, hitched alongside the glowing warmth of the people milling about. He couldn't see them, but they were there - in a myriad faceless multitude, like a thousand lanterns infusing life into the festival night.

They danced, they skipped and ate. They peppered the corners of his mind with animated conversation that faded when he tried to splice words from it. Over, and over, never deviating from the repetitive background noise they'd been reduced to. So very alive--

but darkness blanketed the hazy candled memory in wordless, unspeakable, contextless fear. It was an inexorable predator who outlasted its own name and _his_ recognition of a reality with its own sick carousel.

The mission was a hard line from A to B with no room for diversion. He drew it in bone-white chalk in the canvas behind his eyes. A hard line from A to B, no room for defection. Tomorrow couldn't come _(he could run away, madness babbled, where they couldn't find him)_ but it would, anyway, _(had, anyway)_ and the man who no longer existed would be led to point A in the backseat of an army vehicle with the docile muteness of a steer to the slaughter.

Had gone? Will go. Was at. The Expo had never ended. The increasing years beyond its passing cracked like an internal temporal wound and fissured just out of sight. _("Welcome, to the world of tomorrow -- a greater world, a better world", garbled a disembodied echo)_

Time blurred and broke. 

The man blurred and broke too as his timeline froze at the fair and its yawing tents, its sweet popcorn and calliope.

The moment rolled around again, and again. He rode the merry-go-round with the towheaded boy and admired the array of colors. Simultaneously, one of his hands steadied a tube of metal as the other flipped a safety catch off. The singular fluid motion between drawing and firing was manifold small adjustments, synthesized into aim-neutralize like pianists augment notes into scales with deft, elegant fingers. Far from the carnival, a man retched for brief, darkening seconds as his pulverized heart spasmed then failed.

Sand and daylight. Somewhere. Commotion. Then gone, by virtue of autopilot...but the man who no longer existed was increasingly certain of a disjointness between his eyes and hands.

There was an unyielding vector that quantified the chasm of time between the ceaseless calliope he floated within and the garish desert he was vaguely sure no longer surrounded him. Even that hint of reality felt hard enough to break his teeth on it. Perhaps he still tried - tries? - to grasp it, like an infant reaching for slats of light falling through the blinds. 

The towheaded boy. At the carnival. Not here. The mission had golden hair that had been outlined with comforting familiarity. A distinct Someone in a fountain of sensory feedback, in sharp clarity a named constant where everything else lingered in innominate obscurity. 

An anomaly.

They were speaking something unknown to him, and he could not speak Russian but his mouth returned a mirrored tangle of flowing, punctuated syllables. How did he know it was Russian? 

A lone word broke through the routine, a discordant growl interrupting the report's rising, falling cadence. It was defined by a click, then a long vowel in the center, with a curt, vibrating end. It was a tic as much as an interjection, and it became an unnerving repetition that cleaved words in half and split phrases into nonsensical word salad. Hopper's moth in the machine. They crowded around him with furrowed brows and clammy halitosis and cold pieces of metal, and if the man were in full possession of himself, he'd have clamped down on the bodiless soldier trying to communicate with the dashing boy who was busy riding a phantasmagoric ferris wheel anyways. Breaking routine was not worth it, not even for --

"Steve."

He didn't only taste the word on his teeth and lips this time. Against all odds, it managed to flutter out and flicker around his ears. Pinpricked pupils pierced into the faces of men as he saw them for the first time. He searched them helplessly and blankly, desperation veiled without demonstration; he had forgotten facial expressions years ago and yesterday. They did not interrupt clinical assessment to return his regard in any way as if he were a person. It reminded the man that he no longer existed, and there was only a body.

**"Steve."**

_"--не хорошо, показатели жизненно важных функций, степенный его--"_

A name. A label. Nothing had labels anymore (not since they had drowned him in ice until he forgot his own and learned that he did not exist). The tapering razor bite of their instruments and sparkling shocks descended almost before the name could escape him a last time, because the man was forgetting too quickly and significantly that he had nothing to forget.

Vixens hide kits in the craggy mess of roots and soil of their dens when hounds bay to herald a hunt. Had he loved animals, or had he loved hunting? The man with no identity hid the fair-haired memory's name in the calliope. Then he scattered it at the top of the carousel, and in the streets where the feet of long-dead revelers trampled it into shards of prismic glass. Soon, it was nowhere, where not even they could reach it. Just like him.

The pinwheel of the carousel horses' eyes bulged grotesquely and the carnival warped as the cold bite of a mechanical brachet's tooth found the crook of his elbow. Oblivion flooded the celebratory circus and smothered the lights in soothing amnesia even as he receded back into them.

_("Welcome, to the modern marvels pavilion,_

 _and the world of tomorrow!"_

_._

_"A gre ate r wo rld."_

_._  
.  
. 

_"A bet ter_  
wo  
rl 

_d?")_

 

 

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**Author's Note:**

> Imagine the worst moment of your life lasting for seventy years of being skullfucked with deliberate brainwashing from an entire team of people who're essentially paid to make it worse. I have a lot of Bucky-related feelings.


End file.
